From Practice To Prepared Through Immersive Learning

Rob Wright is the founder of Bright, an immersive learning + simulation company that helps US-based service and sales centers create a cloud-based, simulated call center where employees can take calls, build soft skills, and practice in a software training environment.

Rob spent over a decade providing innovative solutions in Fortune 500, non-profit, startup, and public sector organizations. Prior to founding Bright, he oversaw the global learning strategy function for a reputable Fortune 200 company that educated over one million learners in 130 countries around the world each year. Those experiences are what led him to create his current venture with the Bright platform.

I had the opportunity to interview Rob recently. Here are some of the highlights of that interview:

Jill Griffin: Rob, can you give me a bit of your background and how Bright started?

Rob Wright: I started this company a little over two years ago after stepping down from a leadership position at a Fortune 200 company. I was the head of Global Learning Strategy for a few divisions there.

So – this was pre-COVID – my team trained about a million people a year. Everything we did was in over 100 countries and at least 8 languages. We were a big buyer of learning services. A big buyer of learning tech. I started Bright knowing this space and the alternatives very well. I saw a gap in the area of practice, simulation, and coaching. And in the ability of learning functions to prove – beyond a shadow of a doubt – that their work was driving bottom line.

Everyone just sort of accepts that, in corporate training, you go through slides, you pass your quiz and then – for most people – you never see that training again for the rest of your life. That always drove me crazy. Business leaders would ask why their training wasn’t working. Because that’s not how learning or behavior change works!

So Bright is an immersive learning platform. It’s a technology company for sure. But also a different way to run your entire corporate training shop than I think many people are doing today.

Griffin: Let’s go deeper into immersive learning. What does it mean?

Wright: When most people hear “immersive learning,” they picture a VR headset. But it’s much more important to define immersive learning as – first and foremost – a learning strategy that prioritizes putting people into as lifelike a state of mind, emotion, or decision making as possible. And so, when we say immersive learning, it starts with understanding what the future job will be like. So many jobs or elements of our day-to-day in corporate America today are 2D – Zoom calls, phone conversations, chat threads, software usage – as much as I want to point out that Bright offers, among other things, VR experiences, I also want to point out that you don’t need VR headsets to create an incredibly impactful immersive experience.

We take a very practical approach to reduce training times, while dramatically increasing the amount of practice and coaching time people get. We help companies spend way less time talking at people, and reinvest their time into practice, which gets better results.

The data you get from simulations is also different. It’s skills data. It’s not training completion data. Instead of saying ‘Rob took his training and got 7 out of 10 questions on his quiz right’ I can say things like ‘Rob spent 3 hours in simulations. These are his strengths and development areas. He’s ready to represent the brand.’ Or he isn’t. Or whatever. It’s much more predictive of future performance. While there’s a lot of neuroscience behind it, it’s also sort of common sense: people who practice outperform the version of themselves that didn’t practice.

Griffin: How are your simulations designed and built?

Wright: It depends on the scenario. In some cases, Bright is ingesting customer call recordings and repurposing them into simulations where learners have to record themselves responding to a customer, answering a question, etc. Could also be a patient or healthcare setting – one of our most exciting immersive learning use cases is in the psychedelic therapy arena – in that case you’re using video or VR to recreate the patient exchange. In other cases, we have an authoring tool to build super life-like simulations of the customer’s CRM. So in a typical Bright simulation you’re using the software, you’re talking to this customer or patient, you respond to them, you write an email, and you decide what to do next. It’s all of those things you’re going to do “tomorrow” with a real person, but in a safe environment.

Griffin: The customer they are interacting with, is that someone on your team?

Wright: You can do it asynchronously or live. So if it were a five-minute call, we’d cut it up, and at each stage, you have to speak, write, and use the system. Sometimes you’re getting rated and interactive with the AI in our system. Other times a human is looking at how you performed, giving you feedback, and saying ‘try again.’

I think that’s one of the biggest mindset shifts for the L+D operating model. We want to get trainers out of the business to talking to 30 people in a class at a time, and into the role of highly personalized performance coaching. Instead of spending 40 hours a week facilitating classes or building eLearnings, we want them to reinvest at least half that time into reviewing simulation performance, rating people, and getting employees to build muscle memory around what it feels like to perform.

There’s also an element of AI and natural language processing. The customer sets tailored business rules for how they want to service exchange to go in various high value scenarios, and then our platform watches how humans are rating + coaching those scenarios. Once we find the trend, the platform can automatically rate and coach from there. We’re doing some pretty new things on this front that I haven’t seen any other learning companies do, and it seems to be resonating with business leaders and learners.

Griffin: What differentiates you from your competitors?

Wright: Our vision is to be the first full-suite immersive learning platform. Some vendors do just conversation or soft skill simulation. Some just do software simulation. Some just VR. But you end up with a disjointed learner experience, platform fatigue, and a bunch of data integration pain points. We’ve built a much more holistic platform where we’re doing all of those in a really elegant, cost-effective way.

I will also say that the way we do software simulation is unique. There are not as many competitors in that space for doing software simulations. It’s proven to be particularly powerful in the call center space.

Also, definitely keep an eye out for what we’re releasing now on the AI and NLP front. I’ve told the team and our customers to ‘say farewell to the multiple choice quiz.’ So our aspirations are big there.

Griffin: In the next five to ten years, do you see immersive learning taking a higher market share across companies that are still stuck in the old, traditional learning methods for employees? Or do you see companies still using a hybrid approach – a mix of both?.

Wright: Microsoft’s investing in it, Facebook’s investing in it. Universities are investing in it. Will it grow in the next five years? Yes, it will. But is the thing missing for most companies’ training programs a VR headset? I’d say no. The fundamental reason many corporate training program fail to achieve impact is not because they didn’t have a VR headset. I think most of our customers would agree. It’s on their radar. They’re testing it. But it’s not their most urgent priority. I see the future as more of a hybrid. The ability to wield a broad range of practice-focused learning experiences – conversation simulation, software simulation, AI-powered assessments + coaching, VR + AR in the right place. We’re excited to help our customers push forward on all these fronts!

Griffin: As we wrap up here, can you give me three tips for my readers on how they would consider immersive learning in their companies.

Wright: My first tip would be to start with the mindset that immersive learning is first and foremost a strategy. VR is great, but it’s a means to an end, not an end unto itself. The next step for most companies to ‘immersive’ experiences, is quicker and more accessible than they may think. I’ve seen leaders get distracted by the modality and lose site of the goal of creating experiences that dramatically accelerate skill building with good, provable ROI.

Related to this, the second one is try to build some simulations and scenario-based experiences in 2D. If you can’t do it in a compelling way in 2D, you probably aren’t ready to do it in 3D. This could be conversation simulation. Could be scenario-based tests of learners’ ability to forecast sales. Could be software simulations. There’s a whole capability of knowing how to both build and deploy simulations and practice that looks different than building and deploying traditional training.

The third step would be to start testing other technologies like VR. You’re not just going to start using them at scale and see a benefit. It’s a journey. Start with a simple hypothesis about a place where 360 immersive learning is truly the solution to a business problem. Test it, prove it drives learning better than other methods, prove it helped the business drive bottom line. If you don’t figure that out on a small scale, you’re never going to do it on a larger scale.